PRESS RELEASE

UN Expert: Time Is Running Out for Haiti

April 8, 2014 (EIRNS)—Peter de Clercq, Humanitarian Coordinator for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), warned on April 6 that "time is running out" for Haiti to receive urgently-needed food aid, to stave off a further humanitarian disaster from drought, which has devastated the country’s northwestern region, and severely affected other parts of Haiti as well.

In addition, Haiti’s cholera epidemic, which began in October of 2010 following the horrific earthquake in January of that year, is raging. Despite a lower incidence rate for January-February of this year, Haiti still has the largest number of the world’s reported cholera cases in 2014. "Nobody is concerned about the cholera epidemic," says Pedro Medrano, UN senior coordinator for cholera response in Haiti. "There is silence," he told The Miami Herald.

The blood in this case is on Barack Obama’s hands. The British imperial policy he rammed through in February 2010, following Haiti’s earthquake, instead of adopting statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal to launch an emergency, military-style mobilization and reconstruction program, has condemned millions to death and despair.

In 2013, there were 55,000 suspected cholera cases; yet, of the $450 million the UN is trying to raise over three years toward a $2 billion cholera-eradication plan, only $200 million has come in. "

Any country in the world with 55,000 cases, we would consider it an emergency," Medrano said. "There is no doubt that this is a major emergency that needs to have the attention of the international community." Haiti’s Health Minister, Florence Guillaume, said that had foreign funding been directed toward the cholera-treatment priorities the Ministry had stipulated, "the problem would already be halfway solved."

Meanwhile, months of drought in northwestern Haiti, one of the country’s poorest regions, have wiped out thousands of subsistence farmers, creating such widespread food shortages and hunger that the World Food Program (WFP) had to make an emergency intervention recently to provide food to 143,000 people, on top of the 164,000 it had already aided. "They are in a terrible situation," WFP country director Georg-Friedrich Heymell told Reuters. "They cannot survive without support."